control Motivation and Collective Identity: Testing a Model of Group-Based Control Restoration

Group membership can establish and restore a global sense of control in individuals. This may explain why people more strongly pronounce group memberships and exhibit higher levels of ethnocentric behavior when they are reminded that global personal control is restricted. The salience of such restrictions might be particularly prevalent in times of social or personal crises. In the proposed project we wish to develop and test a model of group-based control restoration as a novel contribution to the explanation of intra- and intergroup behavior. Specifically, we aim at extending previous evidence that threats to people`s global sense of control increase ingroup bias to other measures of ingroup support (such as compliance with ingroup norms) and to exclude alternative explanations in terms of system justification, uncertainty reduction, and self-esteem striving. Furthermore, we intend to test the hypothesis that the confirmation of group membership following control threats improves perceptions of control and well-being, whereas it reduces control motivation and neuro-physiological indicators of threat. Finally, we would like to explore which group properties are necessary for group-based control restoration effects to occur. This research can enhance the understanding of how people cope with various kinds of threat and which role group memberships play in these processes. Beyond that, it can also have important implications for how to improve intergroup relations in times of threat.

Humans are motivated to control events in their environments that are important to them. One may argue that having control is an important prerequisite for action: acting in order to change something only makes sense if it can be changed. People tend to find it aversive to have low or no control, and typically want to regain a sense of control when they lose it. Often, regaining control is difficult or even impossible. For example, individuals are often faced with societal problems and challenges that they themselves cannot solve. The main question we dealt with in this project is how people deal with loss of control. In other words, what strategies do they employ to regain a sense of control, even if this seems futile?Previous research suggests that people use social group membership to regain a sense of control. For example, inducing uncontrollability in psychological experiments has been shown to increase identification with ethnic, cultural and social groups. This is also the central idea in our previously proposed group-based control restoration model that we tested and further developed in this FWF project.One key findings of the project were that low personal control does not necessarily motivate people to become more conservative. It can also motivate support of progressive movements and promote liberal values if these are normative for peoples ingroups. Another key finding was that Agency seems to be a very important property of ingroups and seems to be a decisive factor for whether they can act as coping resource against uncontrollability. Not only do people prefer agentic groups over non-agentic groups, agency also seems more important than group status in this regard. When valued ingroups agency seems threatened, people do not respond to threatened personal control by identifying more with that group. Instead, they prefer to engage in collective action and demonstrate collective agency. This adds to the notion that agency is an important ingroup property.The task of the FWF-funded research team in Salzburg was to explore neuronal processes underlying loss of control and efforts aimed at its restoration using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. We were able to show that activating the concept of uncontrollability activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region that is known from previous research as a conflict detector. According to current theorizing, neurons in this brain region fire in response to expectancy violation and surprise, and project to motor output regions. This pathway might enable humans (and other animals) to adjust their behavior if things are not going as planned and behavioral control is needed. Our results suggest that there is no single brain network solely dedicated to dealing with uncontrollability; uncontrollability seems to activate a rather generic brain network that also responds to other salient events.Apart from characterizing the brain under uncontrollability, another goal was to address the neural processes involved in uncontrollability-induced ingroup favoritism. We predicted the medial prefrontal cortex to play a key role here because it has been shown to be more responsive to thinking about oneself and close others relative to distant others. Therefore, it might be able to link peoples selves to their cherished ingroups. Under uncontrollability, we expected images of ingroup members to elicit greater neural activation in this region than images of outgroup members. Contrary to our expectation, uncontrollability had no effect on activation patterns. However, we did find evidence that mortality salience, another poignant self-threat that is often used in our field of research and that has also been shown to elicit feelings of uncontrollability, boosted MPFC activation levels to both ingroup and outgroup member images relative to low-level control stimuli. Given previous findings that mortality salience increases affiliation striving, we speculate that in this study, mortality salience might have increased feelings of closeness to all players, independent of their nationality.Together, these results were able to improve our understanding of uncontrollability and ingroup support. They might become be practically relevant for improving intergroup relations in times of crises which are often marked by feelings of uncontrollability.